Category Archives: London

And the winner is…

I had three votes in the local election. I voted twice for Labour and once for the Greens. Why oh why did I vote Labour? Because my MP, Keith Hill, recently replied to a letter I sent him about Identity Cards and his letter was good and rather persuasive. The other reason is the card which the good people in the Streatham Labour Party sent me on May Day. It was deep crimson with a fist raised in solidarity on the front. Inside it had the lyrics of Billy Bragg’s version of the Internationale and a brief history of International Workers’ Day. That’s all it took. What can I say? I’m a cheap date. Anyway, as a result of my vote Lambeth was the only Labour gain of the local elections and I’m feeling pretty smug about that.

Dogs are yobs’ ‘weapon of choice’

I was thinking just the same thing yesterday when I saw two youths, each with a puppy. They weren’t treating their little pets very well. At one point a puppy strayed into the road and its owner literally kicked it up into the air and onto the pavement.

It’s a tricky thing. The police are making it harder for people to carry knives on the streets so you can see how those people who would have carried a knife would look around for an alternative to make themselves feel safe. A scary dog can be wielded with pride whereas you have to hide a knife away. There’s another advantage for the ne’er-do-well in that taking a dog for a walk is an extremely good excuse for being in any neighbourhood at any time of the day.

There are, however, some terrible flaws in the dog as weapon plan. The first is that you can’t easily get rid of a dog once you’ve used it in a crime. Not only does it leave genetic material all over the place, on you, in your house, everywhere else, but it is also inclined to find you and follow you home if you throw it into the Thames, something a knife seldom does. People are also likely to become sentimentally attached to their dog, even if it does start incriminating them. And even if they do decide to do away with their former pet, it’s not easy. Look what happened with Bill Sikes’ dog, Bull’s-eye.

BBC NEWS | England | London | Dogs are yobs’ ‘weapon of choice’

Nimby-Phone

There is a protest today in my road. A group of local people are objecting to plans by T-Mobile to put a mobile phone transmitter in the park at the top of the road. I won’t be going. I don’t like mobile phone masts, I’d rather there weren’t any, but since nearly everyone who objects to the masts also uses a mobile phone it seems like the most blatant hypocrisy for them to complain about being able to see them. I have visions of these campaigners marching up and down and then going home to complain to their phone operators about poor coverage.

It would be better if campaign groups like Mast Sanity would campaign against the use of mobile phones, but they don’t because they know it would be unpopular. I don’t have a mobile. Well, I do have one but it’s so old that it only works when it’s plugged in so it’s really just a phone.

There are several reasons why I don’t like mobile phones. The first is that they encourage people to be rude. Once that phone rings the owner almost always goes into a kind of selfish bubble in which everyone around them ceases to exist. I have witnessed people having all sorts of conversations that they wouldn’t have with a real person in public. It also makes me very sad to see a couple walking down the road, one of them chatting away on their phone to someone with whom they demonstrably would much rather be.

The second reason is that they encourage people to be disorganised. The adoption of ‘approximeeting’ seems to have made it much more acceptable to keep other people waiting. It is as if by constantly keeping their victim updated on their progress the latecomer can disguise the fact that the meeting simply wasn’t sufficiently important to justify allowing enough time to travel to it.

The last reason I dislike these phones is the way in which people see them as status symbols. I realised when I first saw an advert which asked “Are you ashamed of your mobile?” that I would never again buy a mobile phone. The fact that the people who sell these phones can shamelessly tell their customers that something they sold them last year is actually crap reflects very badly both on the salesmen and the saps who fall for this nonsense.

There is, in fact, only one thing I like about mobile phones and that is the German name for them. “I’ll call you on your Handy” they say. “Handy” is short for “Handy-phone”. Nice.

Offensive

I find the idea of women walking around covered up with a veil offensive, just as I find the idea of traditional marriage offensive. Of course, some of my best friends are married and I have even attended some weddings and celebrated the love that is expressed at them. What offends me is any suggestion that men and women are not equal and interchangeable. When I see someone marking out their role as a woman in that way it makes me feel that they’re diminishing my role as a parent and an equal partner in my relationship. By suggesting that women should have a particular role – looking after the kids, cooking, staying at home, and that men should be out at work I feel that they are, in some way, attacking the lifestyle that I have chosen.

Of course, I love seeing veiled women walking around because I really enjoy the multi-cultural society I am lucky enough to live in. I know that many women who wear veils consider themselves feminists, they just don’t believe that equality means interchangeability. In the same way I don’t see my married friends’ relationships as any less valid than my own, I’m glad if they’re happy. The point I’m making is that just because someone is a liberal you shouldn’t assume they don’t find things offensive, it’s just that they don’t think they should force you to live your life as they do.

Another thing I find offensive is blasphemy, but I find the attempts by some people to apply religious rules to secular societies even more offensive. The recent outcry about cartoons in a Danish newspaper that poked fun at Mohammed is a timely warning of how unreasonable some people are when it comes to religion. It shows what a good thing it is that the government didn’t entirely manage to introduce this week’s changes to the law concerning incitement to religious hatred.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | French editor fired over cartoons

This is London

One of the things I enjoy while walking to work along the Embankment is the steady stream of joggers who jostle past. They often get stuck behind pedestrians and usually try to keep up a kind of jogging movement despite moving at a slow walking pace. One potential marathon champion I saw today was getting slower and slower as the bovine tourist in front of him took in the view. Too polite to ask her to move he finally had to admit defeat and become just a man taking a walk, in shorts, in January.
The number of joggers always increases drastically after the London Marathon. You can easily spot the newcomers. Apart from their having very red faces their trendy box-fresh jogging gear doesn’t have the gritty greyness that anything exposed to the London diesel fumes quickly acquires. They rapidly lose heart; the numbers are back to normal within just a few weeks.
I do sometimes wonder how much the joggers are costing the National Health Service with their inevitable sprains, strains and damaged knees. The Serpentine Running Club says that one in three runners suffer from some form of lower limb pain and injury. But then, they say, only one in ten of those injured people will need to be operated on in hospital. That still makes it quite an expensive hobby from my point of view.

Bonfire of the Vanities

On Saturday I was sitting in my car in a supermarket car-park, waiting for the trolley man to get his trolleys under control so I could park. A man in an SUV, well a Toyota Rav4 which is a baby SUV, reversed out of his space without looking and made a great big dent in my car. He was very apologetic and although I was rather annoyed I didn’t shout at him. I just asked him to write down his details so that I could pass them on to my insurance company. He wrote down his name, his address and his car’s registration number. I did the same for him. He thanked me for being so understanding and drove off.

On Monday I phoned my insurance company, told them what had happened and gave them his details. They rang back and said that the registration number I’d given them (194 EGK) wasn’t valid. I realised that I hadn’t actually looked at his SUV to check that he was telling the truth. They said that since they couldn’t trace him I’d have to pay the £100 excess on the claim and that my no-claims bonus would be lost, making my insurance much more expensive for the next few years. I started to feel very depressed; it seemed that I’d been conned out of several hundred pounds.

On Tuesday I had a look at some databases and found out that the address he had given me didn’t seem to exist. Flat 7, 57 Orlando Road, London SW4 OLH. The funny thing is that Orlando Road does exist but it has no number 57, the postcode was nearly right as well. So it seemed that he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie completely. He’d tried to be just inaccurate enough to avoid being tracked down. So I figured maybe he’d given me the right name, despite himself and as it was a very unusual name it might still be possible to find him. I googled around a bit and found a page which belongs to someone who looks very like him.
So I did some more detailed searches of the electoral register and eventually came up with a different address very near to the supermarket where the crash happened. There was a phone number listed for another person living at that address so I phoned it and asked to speak to him. Bingo! He claimed that he had given me the correct registration number but when I insisted that it was incorrect he suddenly ‘remembered’ that he had missed a letter from the beginning.

So now the insurance company have all the correct details and that should be the end of it. But I still feel a bit aggrieved at this man who tried to con me. The insurance company say that it is a criminal offence to deliberately give false details, and since it was he who wrote down all his details he can hardly claim that it was me that got them wrong. But then if he is the person who’s web-page I found he works as a project manager on some very cool regeneration projects. Do I really want to get him involved in a process that could have all sorts of terrible consequences for him? Revenge, justice or mercy – big themes for Christmas.

Spare the rod…

The police in London are searching for a man who was seen violently smacking a four year old child and then knocking him or her to the ground. My first reaction on reading this story was that I hope this man gets a good smacking himself when they catch him. But of course, he probably had plenty of smacking and hitting when he was a little boy. It just makes me so sad to see parents hitting their children. What makes me angry is when they try to defend it. I don’t think there is ever any justification for hitting a child, however provoking they may be. What is so particularly depressing is that you often see children who are hit by their parents acting out that violence against other children.

BBC NEWS | England | London | Child assaulted outside DIY store

Small Publishers Fair

The Small Publishers Fair was as terrific as I expected, although I nearly didn’t make it through the door. In the entrance hall to the Conway Hall there was a sign showing all Saturday’s events: Main Hall – Small Publishers Fair, Bertrand Russell Room – Postal Mechanisation. For a moment I was torn, but the children dragged me forward and in to the main hall we went.

Cunning Les Coleman offered a postcard to my daughter Poppy and thus immediately got my attention. He’s not daft. It turns out that he was friends with Anthony Earnshaw who drew, with Eric Thacker, one of my favourite art-type books – Musrum. He was selling some Earnshaw postcards called “Eight Wokker Postcards”. He said I should be sure to post them but of course I’m too selfish. I liked loads of Coleman’s books, but in the end bought just two. 180 grammes, (or maybe it’s called Kojak) is a sort of collection of aphorisms. -“IDENTIFICATION Cars crash; dogs bark; water evaporates; pylons fall over.” It is rather like some of the things in Musrum. “Meet the Art Students” is a book of cartoons of Art Student types. I love books of cartoons of types, who doesn’t?

Mark Pawson was over the aisle from Les Coleman. What can I say? Mark is such a really nice guy and everything he does is great. Order indiscriminately from his clunky site. I finally got around to buying his Pink Paper; it really is absorbing.

Coracle had millions of little books I wanted to buy. Collin Sacket’s book “by playback tape” has a beautiful tiny picture of a cassette tape on both covers and a sort of cut-up poem inside. It reminds me of a poem I recorded for Stan’s Café called Bleak Heart Driver.

The most money spent on one artist prize has to go to John Dilnot though. We bought four prints from him and I already wish I’d bought some of his books as well. It turns out that a few of my friends were already familiar with his work; my friend Isabel even claims that she knew that I’d like his stuff. Well, thanks for telling me Isabel. Anyway it’s OK now because the pictures I bought as Christmas presents are already up on the wall in my hall. This is my all-time favourite, “Little Museum”.

Small Publishers Fair

Oh Boy, oh boy! I love the Small Publishers Fair. Not only are there all sorts of cool small run books published by tiny presses out in the country but also there’s all kinds of weird mail-art posters and badges and what-have-you. One of my favourite artist Mark Pawson, the man who made my favourite T-shirt, will be there with his eclectic wares. 22 & 23 October, ideal for early Christmas shopping.